The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society

Setting the Agenda: The Mass Media and Public Opinion

PART ONE: MASS COMMUNICATION AND SOCIETY Public Communication and Public Interest Contested Territory Media Performance Traditions of Enquiry The `Public Interest' in Communication PART TWO: MEDIA PERFORMANCE NORMS Performance Norms in Media Policy Discourse The Newspaper Press Performance Norms in Media Policy Discourse Broadcasting A Framework of Principle for Media Assessment PART THREE: RESEARCH MODELS AND METHODS Media Organizational Performance Models and Research Options PART FOUR: MEDIA FREEDOM Concepts and Models of Media Freedom Media Freedom From Structure to Performance Media Freedom The Organizational Environment PART FIVE: DIVERSITY Varieties and Processes of Diversity Taking the Measure of Diversity Media Reflection Media Access and Audience Choice PART SIX: OBJECTIVITY Concepts of Objectivity A Framework for Objectivity Research Measuring Objectivity News as Information Measuring Objectivity The Evaluative Dimension of News PART SEVEN: MASS MEDIA, ORDER AND SOCIAL CONTROL Media and the Maintenance of Public Order Policing the Symbolic Environment Solidarity and Social Identity PART EIGHT: MEDIA AND CULTURE Questions of Culture and Mass Communication Cultural Identity and Autonomy Whose Media Culture? PART NINE: IN CONCLUSION Changing Media, Changing Mores Implications for Assessment

Media performance : mass communication and the public interest / Denis Mcquail

The hybrid media system: Politics and power

Q-methodology is a qualitative research technique designed to capture the subjective viewpoints of its participants. Doing Q-Methodological Research: Theory, Method and Interpretation sheds light o...

Doing Q-methodological research: theory, method and interpretation

This article explores the relationship between the media-use patterns of European audiences and the institutional contexts of digital media systems in a multilevel, crossnational comparative research design. A theoretical model is proposed for describing contemporary digital media systems, applied through cluster analysis to a set of 22 European countries. Four digital mediascapes/media system clusters are identified. Regression analysis shows the influence of macro-level media systems on micro-level audience preferences for different media. The media system clusters are related to data on media use from the nine countries in the “audiences across media” study. The findings strongly support the explanatory power of structural aspects at the macroinstitutional level for audience choices in terms of both legacy and Internet-based media.

Digital Mediascapes, Institutional Frameworks, and Audience Practices Across Europe

The paper reviews the status and trends of concentration of media ownership in media markets in Central and Eastern Europe, the relationship of concentration and pluralism of the media and their impact on the democratic function of media. The paper highlights the lack of scientific research on the relationship of media concentration and pluralism of media content in Central and Eastern Europe, and the need to put this on the research agenda politics encircles the future of media system, but it seems to be actively involved in ensuring the continued democratic conditions for the media .

Media Concentration Trends in Central and Eastern Europe

All the most important theoretical models developed for comparing media systems stress the importance of the structural aspect in defining the main dimensions that shape the media field. In this text we focus on audience behaviour in media systems as an aspect of agency, understood in sociological terms as part of the structuration process, and we expand the boundaries of media systems theory by including phenomena related to media use. We apply a cluster analysis to structural variables of media systems and to audience practices in terms of media use in order to find out how similar or different are media structures and practices in different European countries, in relation to Hallin and Mancini’s (2004) theoretical model of media systems. The study finds that European audience practices show a clear North/South, rather than the expected East/West, differentiation. The expectation that all post-socialist European countries belong to the same model is also not supported in relation to structural media variables; some post-socialist countries are more similar to countries in the other two models of media systems in their structural aspects. The study interestingly re-groups European countries into three distinctive structural models which differ somewhat from the original Hallin and Mancini (2004) classification.

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Audiences as a Source of Agency in Media Systems: Post-socialist Europe in Comparative Perspective

The article presents the analysis of the Croatian post-socialist media system within the comparative framework of Hallin and Mancini’s approach. The media system and the political system are analyz...

Rediscovering the Mediterranean Characteristics of the Croatian Media System

This article introduces the Special Section of Participations, in which audience researchers from twelve mostly European countries report on a joint comparative research project about repertoires of news consumption and their democratic implications. The first part outlines theoretical and analytical challenges for news audience research arising from the rapid transformations in current media landscapes, notably the emergence of digital, mobile and social media. We briefly describe our theoretical indebtedness to Jürgen Habermas’s theory of the public sphere, and the recent attempts to redefine the classical notions of democratic citizenship towards the everyday lifeworld. The second part describes the project’s anchorage in media systems theory, according to which national mediascapes can be compared not just on a one-to-one basis, but in terms of their potential membership of one of a finite number of supranational media systems defined in terms of shared structural and institutional characteristics. The third part describes the project’s unique fieldwork design, which followed a tailor-made version of Q-methodology for building audience news Volume 14, Issue 2 November 2017 Page 227 repertoires with greater transparency and reliability than is possible with traditional qualitative methods. This introduction thus provides the shared framework of understanding within which the Special Section’s contributions should be read: The first section includes ten articles, which each presents the findings from one national analysis of national repertoires of news consumption. The second section presents four articles, which in different ways embark on comparative analyses of news repertoires enabled by the Qmethodological framework.

Zrinjka Peruško

Papers

Digital Mediascapes, Institutional Frameworks, and Audience Practices Across Europe

Media Concentration Trends in Central and Eastern Europe

Audiences as a Source of Agency in Media Systems: Post-socialist Europe in Comparative Perspective

Rediscovering the Mediterranean Characteristics of the Croatian Media System

Introduction: News consumption as a democratic resource – News media repertoires across Europe